Take Heart!

First a definition: The Digital Tsunami, noun phrase: The fact that there are now as many pictures taken in a day as used to be taken in a year*.  

Weren't we really talking about the Digital Tsunami last week? You know, all the pictures have been taken already—people take the same pictures of the same things—it's harder and harder to make your work stand out or be your own—and so forth. Mass taste, instant consumption, and snap judgement are leveling critical distinctions and the possibility of subtle, thoughtful work getting noticed; etc., etc.

All that is basically just saying that there's this huge wave of new pictures inundating everything, and in which everything gets lost. The culture's been swamped.

So I was going to write an encouraging post taking the opposite stance. There are a number of things I could point out as to why new photographs still matter: for instance, recency. All photographs recede backwards in time, and the world constantly changes (Mitch Hedberg's photo-epistemological joke encapsulates this, and is good to keep in mind). So just taking a photo that shows something now technically makes any picture different. 

Things like that. There are a bunch of 'em.

But rather than trudge through all those arguments, let's make one single point. You know how, when you love to look at pictures, and you grow older looking at pictures, you gradually develop an understanding about what you personally are looking for in a picture? You might even develop an overarching concept that "umbrellas" what you think is the most important element in all photos that are good for you, as when the critic Owen Edwards declared that glamor was the linchpin of his critical outlook.

And photographing is essentially a scavenger hunt, isn't it? Very few of us can reliably make equally great pictures at any time, anywhere, on demand. Almost everybody takes lots of bad and so-so pictures, along with a smaller number that are really pretty darn skillful and good. This is what I meant when I wrote, back in 2005:

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody's pictures suck, that's how. I've seen Cartier-Bresson's contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers, Frank DiPerna, said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand's exposures sucked. It's the way it is.

But then there's this: the corollary to "most of everybody's pictures suck": every now and then you get one you really love. One that, for you, stands out even from the good ones.

Every now and then you get one you really love.

So isn't that like eating a really good meal, or enjoying particularly good sex, or having a really good day, or happening across weather you think is spectacular—or winning at gambling, or helping someone, or going for a great ride on your motorcycle, or whatever floats your boat? It's this: sometimes things go well. Sometimes things work. Sometimes you're happy.

No matter what we're "after" when you take photographs, sometimes one comes along that just hits on all cylinders, and you just love it. It will most likely be something different for all of us, because we all have different taste and we're all looking for different things when we photograph. One person might like clean geometrical patterns, another might like odd gestures from people on the streets, another might like subtle colors in nature, another might like tender moments between people, another might like a sense of menace and surreality...whatever it is you look for in pictures, whatever satisfies you, sometimes you get it. Maybe it's not fame, or fortune, or renown. But sometimes serendipity blesses you and something good comes along.

Is that alone a good enough reason to keep photographing? For me it is.

So take heart, my friends. Go forth and find that next hit. The next good picture is out there. Get out with a camera in your hand and something good will happen. Don't know where, don't know what it is, don't know when we'll find it. But when we do, then all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well**. Right?

Mike

*This formulation isn't formal: no one knows how many pictures are taken in a day right now, and even the estimates back in the '80s were pretty loose—the figure I saw came from Kodak, which estimated that approximately six billion pictures were taken every year on film back then, worldwide. Given the various metrics I see, I don't think six billion a day is an unreasonable estimate for 2018, given that most people who own cellphones now have a camera in their pocket, and use pictures for everyday communication. So maybe the formulation "there are now as many pictures taken in a day as used to be taken in a year" is simplified, indicative, even allegorical rather than strictly statistical, it still seems like a good way to say it.

**Julian of Norwich via T.S. Eliot.

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Comments

[Ned Bunnell]

Mike, you should take your own advice to heart. What happened to that perfect camera you wrote about so enthusiastically a month or so ago? You haven’t said a word about it since then. I assume it’s still in its box wondering when the heck do I get set free. Take a break from this blog for a few weeks. Start doing day trips documenting all the interesting spots in the Fingers Lakes. Then come back with a series of 12 B&W images that show what’s special about where you live. I’m sure many of your readers who’ve never been to this region would love to see it through your eyes. And remember, long walks with a camera at your side is good for the body and mind.

[Diamondback Billiards]

Digital Tsunami!!! I guess images are also posted because of social media blast! and people have the power to hold a smartphone.

[Gunther Van Ruysevelt]

I’m in Bangkok right now. For my first real holiday in 20 years. I'm feeling not so good. But you keep giving me hope. Kind regards, Gunther.

[Gunther Van Ruysevelt]

My email

[Nature Lover]

I love that sucky paragraph of yours. When I give a presentation to my photo club, I frequently start by quoting it. I do not know if it decreases criticism but it's always worth a try ;-)

[hugh crawford]

I'm pretty sure that for any given day there was a year in which fewer photographs were taken starting sometime around 1830. Also starting around then* for any given day there were more photographs made that day than all photographs made up to some year.

*1826** to be precise if you are counting photographs that have survived.

**Hey, who's making plans for photography's Bicentennial***?

*** although it can be argued that 2017 was the Tricentennial of photographic imaging.

[c.d.embrey]

I'm looking for surprise, not the Same Old Stuff. I'm not surprised by photos of your pet, your children, Half Dome, street-people—been there seen that ad nauseam.

I'll bet that most TOP readers shoot more random shots in an week than I have in my entire lifetime. I very seldom carry a stills camera, and I have never made a photo with a cellphone. YMMV.

My main interest is in motion picture stories. And I still have my Flip HD video camera (fits in my front pocket).

[hugh crawford]

On the other hand, I think that the number of photographic prints has passed its peak a while ago but that's just a gut feeling.

[Manuel]

I like clean geometrical patterns!
And yes - most of my pictures suck.
And, the older I grow, the more critical I am of my own pictures. Maybe that's what they call 'maturity.' (Or maybe I'm just becoming bitter and grumpy.) I remember I used to take hundreds of pictures per day while I was getting acquainted with my first serious digital camera. Now I can only look at two of the pictures I took at that time without feeling embarrassed.
This is not new, nor is it a consequence of digital photography. Garry Winogrand, who didn't live long enough to see the advent of digital photography, famously said "photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the picture as judgment that the photograph is good." I was living proof he was right. And probably still am.

[Rob de Loe]

I've been thinking about the issue you raise here a lot lately. Assuming you're not happy simply with pictures that satisfy yourself, where do you go as a photographer in a world where it seems pretty-much everything has been photographed. As I said in a previous post, the search for "newness" takes people down the road of new techniques (HDR, strange lighting) and back to old methods that seem novel now (wet plate). I see a lot of gimmicky work whose value seems simply to be its novelty.

In a way, it sucks to be a photographer today because there’s an expectation for novelty that I don’t see in writing. If that detective story you just finished is excellent, it’s not going to get rejected simply because your publisher has already published a detective story. In photography it sometimes seems like there’s a master subject list, and if someone else checked one of the entries off, you’re out of luck.

One way out of this is to think like a fiction writer. Given the millions and billions of words that have been written already on every subject imaginable, you’d think there would be no point to writing another detective story. Yet people do it all the time, and they attract audiences and sell books. With all these existing stories, is the only way a fiction writer can be successful to use fancy fonts – lots of them, all at the same time in the same document? Does it require inventing new kinds of punctuation, new rules of grammar? Scratch and sniff? Clearly not. Apparently it requires good writing, compelling stories, and interesting characters. Plus, luck, connections, exposure, etc. (but that’s true for lots of careers).

And now a not terribly original conclusion: Build on what the camera uniquely can do (create images that correspond with reality). Then have something to say in your pictures. Use the grammar and vocabulary available to photographers to say it. Connect with the emotions and feelings of your intended audience. Per Jay Maisel, expose yourself to lots of different things so you have new ideas for your photography.

As a side effect, if you buy this argument, the amount of money you spend on camera gear will shrink to nearly nothing because almost any camera you already have now will do the trick!

[Paul Richardson]

Insofar as most - the vast majority - of everyone's pictures suck, I wonder if what distinguishes a good photographer from a bad one isn't more a matter of being able to spot the jewels amidst all the trash on the hard drive, rather than some innate ability to just go out and take great shots. If you take enough photos, you're likely to hit on a really good one nice in a while, but you have to be able to recognize them later.

[Dave Van de Mark]

I just love it that you can say most of my pictures suck! Pretty good guess - in fact right on the mark! Also right on is the fact we all hit the jackpot once in a while with a “keeper of keepers” that makes one happy and proud.

For me, that most recent day was created by weather and time - a storm clearing just as the sun was setting, bring about colors in the sky and the right mood over the landscape for a superb multiple image view of a marsh backdropped by a bay. Oh, and being there was important too :-) A bench became my tripod. So many factors joined forces here.

[Speed]

Mike wrote, " … the corollary to "most of everybody's pictures suck": every now and then you get one you really love. One that, for you, stands out even from the good ones."

If I want to make more pictures that I really love, I need to take more pictures. Simple.

[PWL]

Well, my view is, if one person (me) is happy with the shot, then I’ve done alright.....

[Stephen S. Mack]

Most of my pictures suck. But, as you noted, Mike, every now and again I get a really nice keeper. People like me are graduates of The Blind Squirrel School of Photography. It's based on the well-known fact that even a blind squirrel can find an acorn, every now and again.

With best regards,

Stephen

[Ernie Van Veen]

My current desktop photo (on my MacBook) is one I took of the Great Wall of China zig-zagging away from me across the mountain tops near Beijing. Just before reading this article, I remarked to my wife that "I can't believe that I stood on that wall and took this photograph", not because it is especially excellent, but because sometimes our trip to China a year ago takes on a bit of dream-like quality, rather than a clear memory, and this image brings it all back.

I couldn't honestly say why I am compelled to make photographs, but this is surely one of the benefits of that compulsion. Of course, there are also drawbacks, like sifting through 50 photographs I made of the conjunction of Mars and the blood moon that all suck.

[Bear.]

Isn't lack of discrimination the issue? Everyone just dumps their digital equivalent of contact sheets into the inter-tubes of their choice without discrimination.

[Kristian Wannebo]

RIGHT !
"Is that alone a good enough reason to keep photographing?"
That alone is the only real reason to (keep) photograph(ing)!

Unless it's ones profession...

[TC]

No one ever talks about the fact that, regardless of how many photos are taken in a day, the number of photos we can look at each day remains roughly the same. So is it really worth getting worked up about whether 60,000 photos are taken every day or six billion? Any given person can still only see the tiniest fraction of that number in either case.

[Tim Auger]

I wonder how many photographs are saved to be referred to more than a day after they were taken.

And no matter how many accumulate on computers or hard drives or phones, I wonder how many are actually looked at more than a year after they were taken?

While many more photographs are taken than ever before, they are treated by many people as disposable. I bet the effective attrition rate is spectacular, and the number that survive meaningfully, in the sense that they will ever get looked at, may not be as vastly increased as we might imagine. Just a thought.

[Tex Andrews]

You've been writing a bunch of stuff lately I'm wanting to comment on. This one is to help me think about something. It's an alternative view to your post.

The photo work(non-pro, that stuff is straightforward) I've been doing since about 2005/6 is kind of an extended meditation on the formal qualities of images. Instead of striving to find the one thing that is "right", I'm trying to question what right is and how it is we get to that.

Therefore the images are very non-hierarchical and don't lend themselves to right/wrong dynamics, on purpose. And yet through that, there's still some ineffable qualities that come through certain combinations that make them "stronger(?)" than others. In some cases it's obvious what that is, in others it's very mysterious. Hint: think field painting, especially but not limited to Pollock, and other aleatory forms, which extends it into music, obviously.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Before you can "take heart" you must know where your heart lies. Why do you take pictures at all? Fame and fortune? Social media acclaim? Mementos? Self-expression (a.k.a. "art")? Does it really matter how many images are taken and posted on the Internet every hour? Do you really consider yourself competing with them for attention? Who's your audience? Where is your heart in photography? What makes it happy?

As an aside, several of my acquaintances who have the deepest knowledge and love of photography never themselves take pictures. Their hearts lie in seeing and knowing images, not the photographic process.

For those who might bemoan their own hit-or-missedness with a camera I close with a rather timeless book, via Google books and the University of Michigan, that many will enjoy: Why My Pictures are Bad, by Charles Maus Taylor

[Wes]

Maybe you should now re-post or link to Monday's "If You Are Depressed" post.

[robert quiet photographer]

A short time ago an acquaintance of mine told me he needed an high memory smartphone because he had around 20.000 photos in it.
20.000 ? Yes :-)
robert